Chennai:

The sectoral distribution of IT workers is: 2.05 lakh in IT software exports; 1.6 lakh in IT enabled services (ITES); 25,000 in domestic software; over 2.6 lakh in user organisations.

In respect of hiring, South India leads at 44 per cent and the lowest is the East India with 6 per cent, states a report of National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom).

The survey focused on the total IT workforce in the country, the skill sets in demand and projections on IT workforce requirement till 2008.

The ITES sector hired 200 people every working day last year. The trend is to hire persons with domain knowledge and related skill set rather than going in for freshers.

Says Nasscom chairman Arun Kumar: ''We saw a pick-up in the recruitment scene in the IT services sector from the second quarter of the year. The skills in demand were in the areas of software analysts, domain specialists, information security, integration specialists, database administrators, network specialists and communication engineers, data warehousing, and semiconductor design.''

Some of the other highlights of the Nasscom survey include:

• The overall medium age of the software professionals was about 26.5 years
  
• 79 per cent of software professionals in software companies were men, whereas 21 per cent were women. However, this ratio is likely to be 65:35 (male:female) by 2005. This ratio is reversed in the ITES sector where the ratio of males to females is 35:65
  
• 42 per cent of the software professionals or knowledge workers possessed over three years of working experience, which reinforces the need for the industry to hire professionals who can scale up the activity and address issues quickly to reduce turn around time
  
• There was an average of 8-per cent rise in basic salary during 2002 with most companies increasingly adopting the variable pay concept in order to link pay to revenues, and control costs
  
• The survey also revealed that 76 per cent of all software professionals had a graduate degree or above - 13 per cent were M Tech, MBA, CA, ICWA; 62 per cent were B Tech, BE or MCA; 23 per cent were diploma-holders or graduates.